About Me

My first novel, Beauty for Ashes, was published by Wings ePress in 2007. My second was published in Summer 2011 by the Arts Council funded organisation YouWriteOn.com but subsequently withdrawn. St Martin's Summer will be published by Wings ePress next May (2018). I've now started work on a trilogy of historical novels set in the fourteenth century. The first of a series of time travelling girl-and-pony stories is waiting for a publisher. I've been married since 1977, and we have two daughters, the big one (35) and the little one (16) - although actually the little one is now taller than the big one!

Tuesday, 16 December 2014

I’ve been reading with interest the reports in the press on the doubts cast by DNA analysis on the direct descent of Richard III and the Tudor line from the earlier Plantaganet kings (see especially the report in The Guardian at http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/02/king-richard-iii-dna-cousins-queen-ancestry). I’m presuming that it is the Guardian’s reporters who are at fault, rather than the researchers themselves, but unless my understanding of the family trees involved is awry, there are some mysteries here.

For a start, there seems little doubt that the body in the
car park is indeed that of Richard III. The researchers have clearly done their
job well in estimating the certainty at more than 99%. It also seems reasonable
that the Society of Antiquaries portrait taken 25 years after his death (at a
time when he was being vilified by the Tudor dynasty) is the most accurate we
have, whether or not the hair has been coloured darker than it really was.

However, some of the Guardian’s
comments about royal descent are eyewash, particularly since the researchers
make the careful point that the break in DNA – the non-paternity event, as they
put it – could have happened anywhere in the 19 generations between Edward III
and today’s Dukes of Beaufort, and indeed it sounds as though there may be two
breaks, one of them in the Beaufort line itself, as opposed to the Plantaganet
line. There is nothing at all to suggest that the break happened between Edward
III and Richard III. But if it did, my immediate reaction would be to wonder
whether it is that Richard III himself was not the son of his apparent father Richard
Duke of York, father also of Edward IV. The mitochondrial DNA is correct – it matches
the modern-day descendants of Edward Duke of York through the female line, from
Richard’s eldest sister Anne. It has been observed on other occasions that he
was not a typical Plantaganet to look at – they were big and strong, vigorous
and usually blond haired, well suited to medieval kingship that often depended
on fighting skills and charismatic leadership.

Added to that, the report talks about gossip about illegitimacy
during Edward IV’s reign. This kind of gossip was a common way of denigrating
an unpopular king or one seen as vulnerable to challenge because legitimacy by
blood was seen as essential to the passing on of kingly traits and charisma.
Richard III declared his nephews illegitimate, but not because they were not
the sons of Edward IV – they almost certainly were – but because Edward had not
been married to their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, at the time of their birth,
owing to a little unofficial bigamy. We don’t know whether Richard III actually
believed this to be true, or merely used it opportunistically to put them aside
because their presence was a threat to his own kingship, but it is one of the
pieces of evidence often cited against
the likelihood of Richard III being responsible for their death in the Tower of
London. If they had been declared and were believed to be illegitimate, then
they were not a threat to him. So this is a different kind of illegitimacy
altogether.

Finally, the Tudors did not only rest their claim to the
throne on descent from Margaret Beaufort, the legitimised daughter of John of
Gaunt and his long-time mistress Kathryn Swynford (in itself rather a weak
claim since it came through the female line not a direct male descendant, but
certainly not a negligible one). They cemented this through the marriage of
Henry Tudor to Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV (sister of the
Princes who had been declared illegitimate, no less). Added to this, the Stuart
line which gave rise to later monarchs (including the Hanoverians through the
female line in the shape of a cousin of Charles II, granddaughter of James VI
of Scotland/James I of England) was descended from Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, who married James IV of Scotland.
Thus the break in biological paternity would have to have happened in both the
York line (descended from both Edward III’s younger son Edmund Duke of York and his second son Lionel Duke of
Clarence, via the Earls of March, the latter again through the female line) and the Lancastrian line (descended from
John of Gaunt) for there to be no biological link between the Plantaganet kings
and our own royal family (see family tree link below - it won't paste directly into the blog unfortunately).

Thursday, 23 October 2014

Just when we were all (well, some of us, anyway) starting to
think that perhaps we had been a bit unfair to blame all of the world’s current
economic woes on the bankers, and that maybe after all we do need bankers and
they do need to lend money and make a profit, I have come to realise that
although we certainly do need bankers, the system really does need to change,
and urgently.

We in the global North are suffering from economic
conditions that are hurting our own working and unemployed poor, to the extent
that in the UK our system of food banks – set up solely because there was a
perceived need to support people who were ‘falling through’ the benefit system
and actually unable to feed themselves and their families – is expanding,
driven by increasing demand. And this at a time when the press is telling us
that Things Are Getting Better, and that more people have jobs (though they
also tell us that tax revenues are down because more of these people are
self-employed or working part time, and on low incomes). Meanwhile food prices
are soaring world wide, and only such items are textiles, plastic toys and cars
remain relatively cheap (though the fuel to run the latter is of course prohibitively
expensive) – and these only because they are made by workers who are being seriously
exploited by multinational companies either in factories in Latin America and
Asia or as migrant workers in the global North.

Thus large swathes of the manufacturing industries that used
to sustain parts of the UK – and the picture is similar across the developed
West – have now been outsourced to poorer countries in what we used to call the
Third World where labour costs are cheaper and labour rights are non-existent
or have been severely curtailed in agreements made between the big corporations
and governments desperate to attract foreign capital investment. This is well
known. However, what I hadn’t realised until recently is how much of all this
is driven by financial institutions and their need for investment opportunities
– so we are back to the bankers again.

The financial crisis of 2008–2009, which directly
precipitated the world into a deep recession from which we are only just
emerging, came about because of risky loans made to, among others, people
taking out mortgages on property that subsequently fell in value. These bad
debts, packaged and frequently changing hands in the financial markets without
proper checks, caused the enormous failure of confidence that very nearly
brought the whole international financial system down in ruin, and we ordinary
taxpayers in the West are still paying for the bailouts and other government
interventions that were required to prevent that global financial failure. It
is a matter of debate whether the conditions that led to the financial crisis
arose from the extensive deregulation of financial markets that occurred in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, in the wake of the departure of large-scale
manufacturing in the global North and the resulting economic reliance of those
countries on financial services. If so, the connection between those decisions
and our current situation is striking.

The recovery from the recent deep recession is distinctly
fragile, whatever governments may tell us, and this morning’s announcement that
Lloyds is shedding 10% of its workforce in the UK, for example, is hardly
likely to inspire new confidence. Little has, however, been done by governments
to prevent a reoccurrence of the Crash, and possibly little can be done without
much more co-operation between said governments, since the Big Banks, like
other multinationals, can threaten to move their operations from one country to
another if things do not go their way. In these circumstances regulation would
need to come from a higher authority that does not yet exist, since the IMF and
the World Bank are essentially lending and monitoring organisations, not
regulatory bodies. Other multinational companies, however (with the possible
exception of that pariah Tesco, whose financial shenanigans are as yet shrouded
in mystery), seem still to be making a profit.

They are doing it, however, by driving down the wages and
restricting the representation of those who work for them. In the global South
this is done by employing a non-union and casual workforce and often by backing
up sanctions against dissent with serious force and brutality, sometimes with
the collusion or aid of the national governments concerned. In the North it is
done by undercutting union-agreed wages, and by emascalating the unions (a
process mostly already accomplished, a legacy of the 1980s under Mrs Thatcher
and her ilk). It is largely a win-win situation for the companies, and a
lose-lose one for the rest of us. However, the driver for this situation is not
so much economic as financial. The owners of capital (mainly the banks and
other financial institutions such as pension providers, insurance companies and
the like) have to find somewhere to put their funds where these will make a
profit. Once they could lend money at a reasonable rate of interest to small
and medium-sized businesses and there was no need for finance to be
internationalised in quite the way that it is now – although that trajectory
was already in place as a result of deregulation. But with interest rates low,
and a residual fear of bad loans crippling the relationships between financial
institutions, banks and other financial institutions are looking for new investments,
and this is where multinational involvement in poorer countries comes in.
Foreign Direct Investment, or FDI, is now a big player in Third World
industrial development. Low-wage and casual labour, high profits, and a ready
market for goods in the global North where such commodities are no longer
manufactured, make this an attractive option for those with money to invest.

Thus even industrial development is now finance-driven,
rather than demand- or enterprise-driven. Money earns little if anything kept in
the bank, since low interest rates originally arising from the recession have
become entrenched as a bulwark against the bad debts that would arise if they
were raised. There is still too much debt, generally in the form of mortgages
and other secured loans, in the North, and central banks fear that raising
interest rates to the level that they should be in the economic climate would ruin
or seriously embarrass many borrowers. Since what recovery there is has come not
from export-led growth, but on the back of consumer-led retailing, much of it
funded by credit card, higher interest rates would risk snuffing it out. Capital
investment has little option but to fuel industrialisation (and consequently
urbanisation and frequently ecological degradation) in countries where hard-pressed
governments see FDI as a way to increase prosperity. The prosperity that is
created, however, benefits only a few in those countries, sometimes as a result
of corruption, sometimes because of the way the industries are set up. Because
the multinational companies ensure, as a condition of their involvement in
industrial development, that their profits pay minimal or no taxes to the host
country, and that dissent or unrest among the workforce will be dealt with in a
draconian fashion that precludes negotiation for better pay and conditions,
they are the ones who benefit – and of course the financial institutions that
funded them.

So we are back to bankers again, and their colleagues in the
pension and insurance companies. Money has always talked, as the proverb has
it. Now it talks globally.

And what is the answer? What can we do, apart from deploring
the situation? Part of the answer is that working people need to see each other
as connected with each other, as brothers and sisters under the skin, as it
were. What affects migrant workers brought in to countries of the global North to
harvest crops or rural inhabitants forced to move into cities to work in
low-paid and insecure factory jobs affects us too. If we allow corporations to
squeeze their conditions, they will be able to undercut ours, and in the end we
will be working for the same peanuts in the same poor conditions – or not
working at all. The other is that our governments and central banks need to
rebalance the system. Interest rates need to rise so that banks, private
investors such as senior citizens with a pension pot to place, and ordinary
savers, can invest in businesses locally as well as far afield or keep their
money in savings accounts and still get a reasonable return for their money.
Low interest rates only encourage people to borrow and/or spend rather than
save, and at some point this has to come home to roost. You cannot build a
successful economy long-term on borrowing, as I have pointed out in an earlier
blog. Both the Chinese and the Americans have experienced this, from opposite
points of view, though I am not sure that either of them have learnt much from
it.

It is ironic that it was at least partly Chinese money,
saved rather than spent by both private individuals and institutions as the
Chinese economy boomed in the early 2000s, that flooded the United States and exacerbated
the very situation of over-lending and unwise borrowing that led directly to
the financial crisis of the late 2000s. We’re back to bankers again, and of
course, in the end, to money itself. Marx had some hard words to say about
Capital and its propensity to exploit those whom it employed. St Paul had some
even harder words to say when warning St Timothy about the Love of Money, which
he considered the root of all evil.

Thursday, 25 September 2014

Climate change seems to have become a major concern, if not
the major concern, of our time, for many in the West at least, in spite of the competing
furies of war, terrorism, disease and the continued hunger of so many in poorer
parts of the world (not to mention those in need of aid in our own backyards!) Is
this because the others are familiar horrors, and familiarity breeds contempt?
Is it the scaremongering that leads us to believe that if we don’t DO SOMETHING
immediately the climate will go on and on getting warmer until we can’t live on
the planet? – this seems to be a very real fear for many.

As readers of this blog will know, I am not all that
convinced by the case for anthropogenic warming. The world has been much warmer
than it is today, before humans ever arrived on the scene, never mind before
they began burning fossil fuels. Cows emit methane, a much more dangerous
greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and the Ice Age plains of Europe were full
of their ancient relatives. But on the other hand, it is clearly true that
carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and the oceans are very high, probably
the highest they have been for many millennia, and whether or not this has
caused the relatively modest warming we have experienced over the past century
or two, it is likely to be significant for the overall climate trend of the
planet. However, I think we are concentrating far too much on reducing our emissions of
carbon dioxide, which will only slow down the rise in CO2 levels, and
not enough on reduction of the CO2 that is actually present.

The Earth has a very good balancing mechanism of its own,
which works well if we don’t interfere with it. What is not much discussed,
however, in comparison with reduction in CO2 emissions, is the way
in which we are wrecking the Earth’s own carbon-reduction system. The
rainforests (which are sometimes recognised in public debate as in need of
protection) and the oceans (which seldom are) both play their part. It is fairly well known that the
rainforests take in CO2 through their leaves, as part of the process
by which they make food for themselves, and of course they also very usefully
give out oxygen. A carbon-rich atmosphere should encourage them to grow well,
which is itself part of the Earth’s climatic balancing system. I think we may just
have learned the lesson that it makes no sense to cut down rainforests (which
are long-term environmental investments by the Earth and which cannot be
replaced quickly) in order to plant biofuel plants. I don’t seem to have heard
much about that lately – and you can run cars on waste products from fish and
chip shops, apparently, so I would hope that this madness has now ceased. But
the rainforests still need much more protection from the rich(er) West because
most of them are situated in tropical countries which have less other resources.
We can do far more than we are doing in this regard.

Even more urgent, however, is proper protection of the
oceans as an environment, because they too are a major sink for dissolved carbon dioxide. The fact that CO2
levels in the sea are so high at present means that the sea cannot absorb
any CO2 from the atmosphere, as it normally would. It is effectively
saturated. This may be partly because of the high levels in the atmosphere, but
I think it may also involve some change in the numbers or behaviour of the
plankton that do the absorbing. However that may be (and you only have to read
the hotly debated issues in the scientific and pseudo-scientific press to know
that no one has all the answers!), when I read that a recent survey of the
ocean surface has calculated that across the globe, around 40 per cent of the
surface is affected by human litter, much of it from ocean-going ships of
various kinds, I almost despair. How long will it take us to give as much
attention to our precious marine treasures as we do to galloping carbon dioxide
emissions or (to a lesser extent) to the rainforests. All pollution is a
serious matter, because the Earth can only deal with so much. If we want a
healthy planet to live on we must look after all its elements, quite apart from
the scenic beauty that surrounds us.

I think we are right to be watchful about rising
temperatures. There are tipping points either way which can prevent the Earth
from rebalancing the climate quickly (though so far it has always managed it in
the end, over millions of years). But climate change can be caused by many
different factors, of which carbon dioxide levels are only one, and quite
possibly a small one at that. In any case, if we are really concerned about
these levels then to neglect any part of the Earth’s own system for removing
excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere seems a form of collective madness.
Sadly, we humans seem rather prone to that – once an idea has taken root, we
can be blind to others even when they are related to it, if they are related at
a tangent. Maybe it is a kind of protective blinkering. After all, ‘human
beings cannot bear very much reality.’ For most of the time, most of us do not
sail the oceans, and so the reality of marine pollution is hidden from us. But
it is real, and it is increasing from an already high level. To clean up the
oceans must be a positive thing to do – but like the atmosphere we all own it,
and must work together to look after it. History suggests that this is the task
that human beings find most difficult. In order to do it, we have to have a
sense of belonging together. But that’s the subject of another posting, another
day!

Monday, 15 September 2014

Two blog posts within a week! My readers will never recover from the shock. But this is urgent, because the Scottish referendum is almost upon us. So here goes.

It occurs to me to wonder how democratic this Scottish
referendum really is, as I’ve thought further about the implications of what
the Scottish Parliament has set in motion. You are entitled to vote if you are a UK citizen (and
certain other groups) resident in
Scotland. There is a provision for people who are out of the country at the
time of the referendum, but none at all for those who were born in Scotland but
are resident elsewhere in the UK. Yet these folk (I know a number of them
personally) self-identify as Scottish quite specifically, and would be
horrified to think of themselves being classed as English (or Welsh or Northern
Irish, too, I daresay, but they would hate the English classification most).
Indeed, the thought is quite ridiculous. These people are Scottish first, and
British second, and take great pride in their Scottish heritage. Yet
they are not permitted to vote in this referendum that may in fact, if the vote
is Yes, strip them of their Scottish citizenship permanently.

It makes perfectly good sense for the electors to the
Scottish Parliament to be elected by those who live in Scotland, as they will
be the people whose lives that Parliament will affect by its policies. But when
it comes to independence, and splitting off completely and permanently from the
rest of the United Kingdom, it is a very different matter. Since Scotland has
been part of the United Kingdom for many centuries, most Scots who are resident
in the rest of the UK have done nothing but engage in simple labour mobility – they have
gone where their work takes them. Their leaving Scotland implies no rejection
of their Scottish heritage or sense of belonging there. Most could have had no idea
that during the period of their exile the Scottish Parliament would demand and
be granted a referendum on Scottish independence in which which they would not
be entitled to vote. If ever there was disenfranchisement, this is it. Of
course it may not be pure coincidence that this disenfranchisement directly
affects the likelihood of a Yes vote. Those who have always seen the UK as a
whole, and have lived in other parts of it outside Scotland, would, I suggest,
be far more likely to vote No than those who have stayed within the country, and far less likely to appreciate Scottish Nationalism.
How significant is this? Is this disenfranchisement of patently Scots people
of many generations’ standing an accident? And it does seem strange
that there has been little comment upon it, as though not many (apart from the Scots affected, presumably) have considered it.

Worse still, if the vote is Yes, those Scots people will,
unless they abandon their careers forthwith and scramble back into Scotland
before independence is finally declared, be permanently deprived of citizenship
in the country to which they belong, and to which their families have belonged,
the vast majority for many centuries. How can this be just? What will they then
be – English? Welsh? according to the country they happen to be living in (this
wouldn’t automatically qualify you to play for England at cricket or football,
or represent a country at the Commonwealth Games, for example), or will they be
left only with Britishness? I think some Scots have started to think about this
– a letter or two about it has appeared in the newspapers – but
it is something that should really have been considered long ago, before a
referendum was agreed to by our foolish Coalition government. No wonder the
Queen has advised the Scots to think very carefully. Above politics she may be,
and unwilling to get involved on either side (quite rightly, as a
constitutional monarch). But there is a coded message there. She knows it would
be a mistake to tear the Union apart without very careful thought. I just hope the Scots who are entitled to
vote will heed her advice.

Tuesday, 9 September 2014

No one in the UK – or, for all I know, elsewhere in the
world, can avoid knowing that the Scots appear to be (if the polls be believed)
seriously thinking of leaving the United Kingdom. What seemed to me, and I
think to the Better Together team too, a remote possibility when the referendum
was first mooted, looks now to be what Wellington might have called “a damned
close run thing”. God grant that we can look back at it as Wellington did at
the Battle of Waterloo, and not with the chagrin of his opponent Napoleon
Bonaparte.The very thought of having border controls between us makes me feel
quite upset. I remember a few years ago travelling up that wonderful high road
that takes you through the Cheviots into Lothian, where you come up to the sign
that says ‘Scotland’ and the whole landscape changes as you pass over the
geological join between England and its neighbour that was tacked on millions
of years ago. Will we have to show our passports next time we go?

I count myself as English, when I think about it at all – and
born and brought up in England, too, though there’s very little Anglo-Saxon
English in me, when all’s said and done: I’m a nice amalgam of Celt, Viking and
Scot – more Celt than anything else, probably, on my father’s side (his family
came from Devon originally though our most famous member is renowned as the
Bard of Bath); my mother’s family came from the north-east, where there are
more Norse descendants than Saxon ones, and her grandmother was a lowland Scot.
I don’t know of any Welsh ancestors, but the West Country celts are closely
related, historically. And this mixture is very typical of those of us who are ‘English’.
We don’t say much about our Englishness, for fear of offending the Scots, Welsh
and Ulster folk, and we are a polyglot crew, it has to be said. So the idea of
Scotland becoming independent ought
not to worry us too much. If they do decide to vote that way, they will be
bringing themselves all kinds of problems, economic and otherwise, I suspect –
as Better Together keep telling them and Yes Scotland keep denying. Perhaps the
only way to know for certain is to try it out; but what a gamble. However, we non-Scots
don’t have a vote, so why worry? In a sense it isn’t our problem.

But in another sense it is. Not only will the loss of
Scotland as a piece of national heritage be a terrible one – so many of our
British heroes and heroines originated there (not least modern ones such as
Andy Murray), but there will be a terrible rending politically, socially and
economically if a piece of this integral structure we call the United Kingdom
is torn off. It will be an open wound
for decades, and very slow to heal. There will be grief, trauma and economic
struggle for both sides. And for what? Scottish pride, which they could have
anyway – and always have had? The ability to make their own decisions, and be
free of Westminster? They already have considerable powers, and the British
government seem willing to concede more, if they decide to stay. Do they really
want complete responsibility for everything, including defence? We have already
seen how complex disentangling governance institutions will be if independence
comes, not to mention the pound (one of the largest economic reasons to stay).
Can this really be in the best interests of the Scots themselves, never mind
the rest of us?

I have to admit I really can’t understand how Salmond has
persuaded even 40 per cent of the Scots that it might be a good, or even viable
option to leave the United Kingdom – and I must say I resent the suggestion
that they might evict the Queen. Salmond is a clever politician, and a
personable one, as well – I met him once, on a train travelling between London
and Edinburgh, in the early 1990s, and liked him, though at the time I hadn’t a
clue who he was, as he identified himself only as a nationalist politician; I
only recognised him later from a newspaper photograph. But he was very
persuasive, even then.

However, it doesn’t matter what I think (as any readers of
this blog will no doubt themselves be saying at this point). We in the rest of
the UK don’t have any say in the matter, although the outcome will affect us
almost as much as it will the Scots themselves. So I can only say, sincerely:
Scotland, please don’t leave us! We need you. We love you and your people
because YOU ARE PART OF US.www.janeanstey.co.uk